The invention relates to a method of producing printed products by inserting partial products and/or enclosures into a primary product, which is supplied, fold-first, to successive, uniformly-spaced pockets disposed transversely to the conveying direction at the beginning of a production path formed by feeders, the product subsequently being grasped at a protruding gripping edge and opened for the insertion of partial products and/or enclosures.
Methods of this type are executed by insertion machines. Such machines are described and illustrated in, for example, patent documents DE-C2-27 06 353, EP-B1-0 336 062 and EP-A2-0 475 192.
These known insertion machines produce about 40,000 copies per hour of a printed product, such as a newspaper, that typically comprises an actual outer portion, or primary product, and one or more partial products and/or enclosures that have been inserted into the primary product, also referred to as pre-products, as they are usually available for processing before the primary product.
An obvious way to attain a substantially higher production output would be to operate the relevant processing components at a correspondingly higher speed. This measure has proven insufficient, however, because the available insertion system, the automatic feeder loading and the removal system would not assure reliable production with an output of over 50,000 copies or printed products per hour.